But some simple reporting on the decision--as in this ESPN story--shows that the decision stems from a court appeal filed during the GW Bush administration and a similar decision by this Office during the Clinton administration.
This week the Office Trademark Trial and Appeal Board denied certain trademark protections because the team nickname is deemed "disparaging to Native Americans." This was pretty much the same decision that the Office made in 1999, which was overturned on appeal. A new appeal by Native American clients was filed in 2006, resulting in this 2014 decision. The Washington franchise is expected to appeal to the US District Court.
Since this is a hot button issue on the Internet, lots of political sites weighed in, all the better to get your clicks my dear. The extreme right now goes well beyond contesting racism in specific instances to denying that racism exists at all. The political reflex cliche is "playing the race card" frequently mated with "PC" and swiftly therefore on to Nazi dictatorship.
Defenders revert to tradition and the good intent of the franchise to honor Native Americans by naming a team after the supposed color of their skin--all arguments I recall when what is now known only as the N word was commonly spoken in public in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Meanwhile there is increasing awareness that naming teams after racial and ethnic groups is an obsolete idea--it was always insulting and now it is just obviously so. Native Americans are historically a particularly egregious case, and the Washington franchise is the worst but not the only such instance. Perhaps because living Native Americans are invisible to much of the American public, it is apparently still harder for many to see the "disparagement" inherent in these nicknames and logos, which would be obvious to almost everyone if they were applied to black skins, yellow skins or certainly white skins of various ethnicites.
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